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Re:558M-year-old fossils identified as oldest known animal by Emma_Goldman on Sunday September 23, 2018 @01:35PM (#18052128)
I've heard this said many times and believed it, but read to day that the leap from single-cell to multi-cellular organisms happened a dozen or so times independent of each other. That makes it an order of magnitude less improbable, if true.
Re:558M-year-old fossils identified as oldest known animal by gus_massa on Sunday September 23, 2018 @02:27PM (#18052413)
Yep, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurre...

> [...] However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants. It evolved repeatedly for Chloroplastida (green algae and land plants), once or twice for animals, once for brown algae, three times in the fungi (chytrids, ascomycetes and basidiomycetes) and perhaps several times for slime molds and red algae.

Re:558M-year-old fossils identified as oldest known animal by Brockenstein on Monday September 24, 2018 @09:31AM (#18057480)
Lots of things evolved multiple times independently. And while we make a big deal about multi-cellular life, there's still nothing so special about it that that is the one thing that could only have happened once...